Let us know what you think of maps in Web Forms

[Aly_Blenkin]

We’ve been working on improving map functionality in Web Forms and are getting close to releasing capturing shapes/traces, and editing features that allow Project Managers to fix map-related mistakes from Central.

We’d love feedback from data collectors and form designers on how map interactions feel today. In particular, we’re interested in understanding your experience with capturing points/lines/shapes on a map on both desktop and mobile devices.

Questions

• How is your experience creating a shape or trace on the map?

• How does it feel to place a point using the map or placement-map appearance?

• Are there any moments during these interactions that feel confusing, slow, or unintuitive?

• Are there moments that feel smooth or work especially well?

• If you could change one thing about the experience to better fit your workflow, what would it be?

How to try it

You can test this functionality using the Web Forms preview page and uploading this map question types form.

The experiences feel slightly different on mobile and desktop, so please try out both and let us know what you think! To quickly try it on mobile, use your camera app to scan the QR code

[ahblake]

Are there any moments during these interactions that feel confusing, slow, or unintuitive?

The time required for the long press/click feels quite long, ~1.5s.

Undo only keeps one step - more would be nice, but not critical.

How is your experience creating a shape or trace on the map?

For polygon, on mobile (chrome, android) the point doesn't appear until releasing (manually entered or automatically recorded) but in desktop (chrome, MacOS) the point does appear after the delay.

For line (manually entered or automatically recorded), the delay is the same, and the line doesn't update until the press is released, but the point count does increment on screen before release if a point wasn't already selected. Desktop does show the point and update the line after the delay, then autoselects the point on release. On mobile this means you have to guess if it's long enough, release, fail, try again, or hold for too long, taking more time.

Desktop/mouse also autoselects the last placed point (filled blue), which shows the coordinate, but mobile doesn't autoselect the last point and instead shows the # of points saved for both line and polygon, (unless an existing point is selected, in which case it remains selected, showing the coordinate of it instead of # points saved.)

How does it feel to place a point using the map or placement-map appearance?

For Point that can be manually-entered on map & Point with user confirmation on map
if you are not near the desired location you can't go straight to zooming/panning there and place a point, you must first get location, then zoom pan and place a point. This would be especially annoying for desktop based work remote from the survey location.

Are there moments that feel smooth or work especially well?

Moving points is 'mapbox-like' with no long press/click needed, instant grab and move.

Also the ability to delete a point that isn't the last point is great, to modify a line/shape without having to delete all the way back to the issue.

Seeing the last point as a darker outline colour helps identify it for adding another point, knowing the first point might be useful, I'm unsure

Mousing over a line between points and long pressing to add a new point between them (this is fantastic, and thank you for pointing that out @Aly_Blenkin ) - it's quite clear that you are adding with a mouse as it shows a small circle on the line, but by touch it's not clear until the point is added if you were "on" or "near" the line and you inserted a point between or added another point at the end.

If you could change one thing about the experience to better fit your workflow, what would it be?

Reduce the time to create a point
Adding points between existing points

[seewhy]

Overall, this is great.

How is your experience creating a shape or trace on the map?
Positive! Although the long press / click-hold feels a bit too long (I 'chickened-out' a few times and so it didn't register the point). Adding intermediate vertices is excellent (once you know it is possible).

How does it feel to place a point using the map or placement-map appearance?
I was unable to do this without granting location access (both mobile and desktop) for those 3 questions. So I didn't... But I think @ahblake makes good (geo)points on this subject

Are there any moments during these interactions that feel confusing, slow, or unintuitive?

As above, the delay is just slightly too long to be intuitive (how long is a long-press - slightly longer than other apps, it feels) and it means building a trace / shape might take a while. Isn't it interesting how short my attention span is! If you'd allowed me to do this 10 years ago and I'd have said it's blindingly quick...

It's more of a problem when using touch screen as I can't see when the point is registered under my finger, so releasing too soon is a bit more clunky than with a mouse. Maybe a 'larger icon' flashed up on point-create would help that for the fat-fingered to see that the point has been registered?

On the desktop, when adding intermediate vertices to an existing shape there was a slightly confusing pattern of the highlighted dot - it seemed to jump between points (seems to change both on point create and mouse release), which is a little confusing.

One moment of 'panic' on the mobile - I caught the full screen button by mistake and then couldn't navigate to the rest of the form - I hadn't registered it was 'a thing'. Maybe setting that as a toggle might be a useful visual reminder, certainly on the mobile? The icon for full screen and full extent are quite similar too - not a problem once you know - maybe 'two arrows' rather than 4 might help differentiate more easily (for the old and poor of sight).

- Example full screen icon source (not a recommendation, just a credit of origin!)

Also when pinch zooming, my device changed from zooming the map to zooming the page after a certain level of zoom (obviously when moving from world map to a location, you can't do in a single pinch - it's less likely to occur if you give location access, and want to record a point / trace / shape there) - I think that's probably not an ODK problem, but interesting and not intuitive experience.

In full screen mode on my mobile, the coordinated / # points saved box is not visible - this doesn't feel right, as it is presumably there to reassure the enumerator...

The icons are in a different order to Collect (Old Dogs, New Tricks) - good that two of the icons are identical though!

*** Are there moments that feel smooth or work especially well?**

• The add intermediate vertex feature is excellent.
• The move vertex works well (large dots are easier to work with than on Collect) and
• Delete any highlighted vertex is also really useful.
• +/- zoom buttons are useful (see above!)
• Not needing to use 'two-finger-pan' on a touch screen is very welcome (seems to be 'a thing' for some web sites, which makes navigating maps less intuitive for old people like me)

If you could change one thing about the experience to better fit your workflow, what would it be?

Shorten the delay on point create

And because I'm greedy and want 2 things, highlight the start point on a shape to make it easier to see where you started (maybe red outline, white fill, then the blue fill could still be used if it is highlighted to move) - obviously if this vertex is deleted it needs to handle that, but maybe it could be transferred to the new vertex 1 by default?

Ach, why not, let's go for 3 things...
maybe an 'info' icon to show the capability / features / explain the meaning of icons to numpties like me. Like a guidance hint. Fortunately I read @ahblake post before writing this, so I discovered (and tried out) things like delete any vertex... It's great if you know, but how do you find out when using for the first time (or repeating after a while). This would also be welcome on Collect - I keep having to write instructions (not ideal in a question hint as you have to describe the icons!), especially for the zoom to extent of data icon, which is useful when using / filtering geo-entities...

[Aly_Blenkin]

Thank you so much for the thoughtful feedback @ahblake @seewhy!

I’m going to hold off on commenting for now so I don’t bias the discussion. If others have feedback we would love to hear from you!

[mathieubossaert]

Hi Aly,

Thanks a lot for the work and examples
I have nothing to add to Andrew and Chris's tests and comments